Posted on 04/04/2008 8:10:23 AM PDT by blam
Aztec Math Decoded, Reveals Woes of Ancient Tax Time
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
April 3, 2008
Today's tax codes are complicated, but the ancient Aztecs likely shared your pain.
To measure tracts of taxable land, Aztec mathematicians had to develop their own specialized arithmetic, which has only now been decoded.
By reading Aztec records from the city-state of Tepetlaoztoc, a pair of scientists recently figured out the complicated equations and fractions that officials once used to determine the size of land on which tributes were paid.
Two ancient codices, written from A.D. 1540 to 1544, survive from Tepetlaoztoc. They record each household and its number of members, the amount of land owned, and soil types such as stony, sandy, or "yellow earth."
"The ancient texts were extremely detailed and well organized, because landowners often had to pay tribute according to the value of their holdings," said co-author Maria del Carmen Jorge y Jorge at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, Mexico.
The Aztecs recorded only the total area of each parcel and the length of the four sides of its perimeter, Jorge y Jorge explained.
Officials calculated the size of each parcel using a series of five algorithms—including one also employed by the ancient Sumerians—she added.
"Rule of Thumb" and Other Body Parts
The Aztec arithmetic included fractional symbols like hearts, hands, and arrows that seem unusual to modern eyes. But to the Aztecs they likely had a relation to the familiar—the human body.
"For example the heart," Jorge y Jorge said.
"If you stretch out your left arm, that would be the measure from your heart to the tip of your finger. If you stretch both arms, the measure of the hand would be the distance between the tips of your two fingers.
"It's just very natural. Your body you carry with you all the time and it's very easy to refer whatever you want to measure to your body."
The primary land unit was likely the distance from the ground to the tip of a finger on an adult's upraised right arm—about 8.2 feet (2.5 meters), she said.
Jorge y Jorge and co-author B.J. Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Rock County report their findings in this week's issue of the journal Science.
"I think [the study] is neat because it shows that this sort of math and science was pretty practical in orientation," said Michael Smith, an archaeologist and Aztec expert at Arizona State University.
"We have the idea that ancient societies were dominated by religion. Yeah, religion was important, but they were also very practical people doing very practical things," Smith said.
"With this sort of rule-of-thumb surveyor's math, they figured out a way to get it done."
No kidding, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Guess there were more than one ways to lose an arm and a leg back in the day ... *ducks*
And they didn’t take too kindly to people appealing their assessments...
}:-)4
Gives a new meaning to “Tribute” bands.
So, if you didn’t paid your taxes it really could cost you and “arm and a leg”!.........................
Aztec Math Used Hearts and Arrows
I didn't realize the Aztec were so tall that the average one could reach up that far.
I wonder if the early speculators were able to pyramid their gains. Ba da bump.
Too funny!
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Thanks Blam. |
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This will be the basis for the Internal Revenue Code of Aztlan.
So basically even in this relatively primitive society, the tax man’s fees were counted via a system that used your body parts as counters.
No doubt they’d charge something like three fingers for late filing, radical circumcision for failure to file and rip your heart out for finagling your tax return.
Things never change. The Tax Man cometh soon.
When doing a rough measurement on the size of a room, for example when I want to buy paint or a rug, I use the finger tip to finger tip measure, which in most people is the same as one’s height. In my case roughly 5 1/2 feet. I also use the span from thumb tip to pinky tip, which is 8 inches, for small measurements, like the width and depth of a refrigerator or washing machine. This is really handy when you are at a yard sale without a tape measure.
Distance
In all traditional measuring systems, short distance units are based on the dimensions of the human body. The inch represents the width of a thumb; in fact, in many languages, the word for “inch” is also the word for “thumb.” The foot (12 inches) was originally the length of a human foot, although it has evolved to be longer than most people’s feet. The yard (3 feet) seems to have gotten its start in England as the name of a 3-foot measuring stick, but it is also understood to be the distance from the tip of the nose to the end of the middle finger of the outstretched hand. Finally, if you stretch your arms out to the sides as far as possible, your total “arm span,” from one fingertip to the other, is a fathom (6 feet).
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/custom.html
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